I thought I had my problem solved when I saw this SO answer
Issue with Android Hybid app to display remote image with Ionic framework?
This works in development and I deployed this APK to the store as my app was effectively broken and when it's downloaded from the Play store it doesn't work. No images from external URLs are down.
I have done in Config.xml:
<access origin="*"/>
<allow-navigation href="http://*/*" />
and the following in index.html
<meta http-equiv="Content-Security-Policy" content="default-src *; style-src 'self' 'unsafe-inline'; script-src 'self' 'unsafe-inline' 'unsafe-eval'">
Additionally it would be great to know how to simulate this is testing as if this was to happen with the Apple App Store we would be in trouble.
==EDIT==
So I have pinned this down to the release APK. The debug works perfectly however when I install the release APK manually then I am unable to view the images from external sources. Obviously I am unable to debug this version either?